The soldier guards said go through. He went, through the corridor into a barracks main-room crowded with people he knew, people he liked, guys who grabbed his arm and wished him well. He thought, If you only knew what I’ve done to you ... ...

And almost lost everything when Meg got through the crowd and flung her arms around him. Cheers and catcalls from the company, egging her on for a kiss he didn’t shy away from, but all at once he was leaning on Meg, not certain which way was up. Dark was around him, that hazed back to light and the faces—

You all right? someone asked him, and he tried to say he was. Guy belongs in bed, somebody else said, but he said no, and they shoved him at a chair and told him the galley was sending food to barracks and in the meanwhile things had to be better, they were under Fleet control, they were trying to straighten out the duty roster and figure who was on what tomorrow...

Meg hauled a chair up facing his, grabbed his hands and made him look at her.

“Dek. You tracking, cher?”

“Yeah,” he said. He wanted a phone, he wanted—he didn’t know now whether he could cope with the news station or his mother. He kept hearing echoes, like the sim room. Someone saying, Enjoy the ride, Dekker. But the voice never had any tone. It drowned in the echoes.

He kept seeing the accident sequence on the tape. Not threatening, just a problem. He kept thinking about his mother, the apartment, the dock at R2. He kept seeing mission control, and a silent fireball. And the dizzy prospect down the core, all lines gone to a vanishing point. Fire pattern in the sims. Intersecting colors. Green lines. Track, and firepoints. He shook his head and took account of the room again, guys he ought to love, if he had it left. But maybe he was like Porey. Maybe he didn’t have it, or never had had. More comfortable not to have it. More comfortable to love the patterns more than people. Patterns didn’t the. They just evaporated. People went with so much more violence...

“God, he’s spaced. Get him on his feet.”

“We’re going to fly with this moonbeam?” Arm came around him, hauled him to his feet, and he didn’t resist it. “I tell you, I should’ve been in Stockholm, should’ve got my transfer—I hate this shit.” Friends here. People he trusted. People he’d betrayed in there with Porey, because he’d been a damned fool.

“Man’s got to eat.”

“Somebody ought to call me meds.”

“No meds.” He’d had enough. He walked. He got to his room. He hit the bed.

“Didn’t search the room,” he thought he heard Meg say. “Didn’t mess up the drawers, I mean, these MPs are politer than Company cops.”

“Peut-et’ they’re just neater,” Sal said; and Ben:

“There wasn’t a search.”

“How do you?” Sal started to ask. And said: “Silly question. Trez dim of me.”

Electronics and flash-scan assured privacy, even against fiber and remotes. Security swore so. Graff could feel secure in this cubbyhole next the carrier’s bridge, if he could trust present company.

Ask Demas and Saito who they belonged to? They’d say—Captain Keu. Of course. Saito would say it without a flicker. One preferred to hope and reason that was the case, rather than ask a pointless question.

“Tanzer’s actually dispatched a resignation,” Saito said, apropos of the situation within the station, “but it came back negative out of Geneva. That means the UDC wants him where he is. Which could be show of opposition: they could replace him three days from now. Or they want him where he is because he knows where the records are and what’s in them, which could be useful to them here. They lost a big one. Forces inside the JLC lost a big one.”

“We didn’t know,” Demas put in, doubtless reading minds, “when it would shift. That it might—one hoped.”

He considered a question, shot a sidelong glance at Demas and asked pointblank: “And Porey? Where does he fit?”

Demas broke eye contact, just momentarily. Saito’s face was absolutely informationless.

Saito said, then, “Porey is highly successful.”

“At what!” Anger betrayed him into that bluntness, anger and the memory of dealing with them differently. “At covering his trail, evidently.” If they were Porey’s or about to be, he was laying a firetrack in his own path, he knew he was, but he had his personal limit of tolerance. And he disturbed them. Even Saito flinched, looked down, saying:

“Some things are excused, as long as the results are evident. Some patterns of behavior simply do not come through in social context....”

“Other things,” Demas said with unexpected harshness, “are blindly ignored. The captain is head of Strategic Operations. The captain is too valuable to assign back to Hellburner, so says the EC. Porey is available. He could be promoted into qualification. That is what happened, J-G, plain and simple.”

He looked at Demas, saw fire-flags left and right of this conversation and knew he could self-destruct here. He took a chance on them—a last chance. “Who wanted him? Who?”

“—promoted him? Who does promote by executive order these days?”

Mazian. Who wasn’t the best of the militia captains: Keu was; or Kreshov, maybe. But Mazian was the promoter, Mazian was the one who could smile his way through corporate and legislative doorways, Mazian could say things the way they needed to be said...

“The Earth Company,” Saito said, “has SolCorp, LunaCorp, ASTEX, all space-based entities. But it also has its hands deep into the whole EuroTrust industrial complex— Bauerkraftwerke, Staatentek... the list is extensive—that have very good reasons to want extension of their facilities outside the reach of pressure groups and watch committees— meaning, into space. Those Earth-based companies give the EC an enormous influence inside the Joint Legislative Committee. The citizen pressure groups are enormously naive, usually single-issue. They think they move events. But in general the JLC is riddled with influence-trading, purchase decisions made on relationships, not quality....”

“Ancient terrestrial lifeform,” Demas said. “Dinosaur. Vast body. Little brain. It flourished in an age of abundant food supply.”

“I’ve heard the word,” Graff said.

“Not to overwhelm you with local history,” Saito said, “but the UDC is a composite creature that never did function well. The Earth Company created us to oppose Cyteen’s secession; but it never imagined a splinter colony could raise a population base of Union’s size and it never imagined the light barrier would fall so quickly.”

“More,” Demas said, “it didn’t understand the shipbuilding capacity of an enemy with no social debt. Ships cost Union nothing but sunlight, ultimately. Do you want more facilities? Create more workers.”

“But now the EC understands,” Saito said, “at least enough to frighten them. The special interests understand enough to see their interests are threatened. Now everybody wants to manage the crisis. Everybody wants to safeguard their power base. Everybody believes there’s fault, but it’s most certainly someone else’s. The free-traders are making headway.”

“Union-run merchanters,” Graff muttered. “Long we’d last. And they’d be nothing to Union but a supply source. Cyteen manage Earth? There’d be short patience.”

“Possibly they’d founder of bewilderment. —But that is the truth, J-G: the Company brought us here because Earth doesn’t believe in star-travelers unless it sees us: and its own problems absorb its attention. The EC needed the demonstrable presence, the face and the voice to make the outside real to these people. And whether they’ve believed their own myth, or simply view Mazian as manageable—he’s gotten far more important than we planned.”

He was listening to sedition. To conspiracy. The captains had sent Mazian downworld, they’d chosen their spokesman— who excelled mostly at salving over wounded egos, at getting the captains to make unified decisions. It was merchanter command structure: Mazian was only the Fleet’s Com One....